AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Twenty-One
The man who sat on the table in front of me had a thick red beard and bright blue eyes. He took my chin and stared into my eyes in a way that made me lean in, as if drawn to sink deeper into his gaze.
It felt like sliding into a warm bath, as if something pulled me down and surrounded me.
I could feel him inside my head, his metaphorical fingers slipping along the edges of my brain, not painful but not comfortable either.
“What are you?” he asked as if to himself.
Still, I answered. “I don’t know.”
His eyes narrowed—not out of anger but as if concentrating—and I cried out at a sudden pain in my head, as if that gentle stroke had become a jab.
As soon as it happened, it eased though didn’t disappear entirely. Flashes came to me, moments of my life. Different foster homes, the Christmas I spent at a friend’s house, one of my only real Christmases, the times I spent in Gran’s shop. They were tiny moments of my life, the good and the bad, and he sifted through each of them as if looking for something specific.
“How much ambrosia did you give her?” he asked without breaking eye contact.
“More than enough. I’m not sure she’d survive anymore.”
“The synapses in her brain are unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” the man said, frowning before digging deeper into my mind, causing another lancing pain. Even still, I couldn’t pull away.
“Am I right?”
“Maybe. You’re asking me to identify something that hasn’t ever existed.”
“Force it out of her. She went incorporeal. If she takes that form here, I’ll know I’m right.”
The man pressed his lips together and yet another sharp pain consumed me, as if he’d poured molten lava through my head. After a moment he shook his head and released me. “I can’t.”
“Because it isn’t there or becauseyouare unable to?”
The man rose, rubbing at his temples. “I don’t know. Ifeelwhat you’re talking about, but I don’t know if there’s enough of it to matter.”
Lucifer crossed his arms, looking less pleased. “I hope you don’t expect a full payment for this.”
The man turned his eyes toward me, a resistance there. “As long as I never have to go into her head again, I’ll take no payment at all.”
Lucifer waved him off, the man rushing away.
It hit me as hilarious. The whole situation, how even the devil couldn’t seem to make heads or tails of me. Wasn’t that my place in life? Or in the afterlife, it seemed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, tone sharp.
“Everyone wants to understand what I am, and no one can figure it out. The thing is that I’ve spent my whole life trying to be one thing—normal. Now here I am, at the other side, in hell, and it is that same question. It never goes away, never stops. What am I?” I laughed again, knowing my voice had a hysterical edge to it. “After everything I’ve seen and lived through, and I finally figured out it doesn’t fucking matter. I mean, if you and your brain melon baller there can’t figure it out, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the end.”
Lucifer came forward and leaned in closer, as if he could peer through my eyes, into my head that this friend had dug through, and see something he’d missed. “It matters, Ms. Harlin, because if I’m wrong, we’re all fucked.”
Even if I’d wanted to say something back, even if I’dhadsomething to say back, the ambrosia overpowered me at that point. The spinning room lost definition, and it was Lucifer’s dark eyes that haunted me as I passed out.
It seemed I was a girl who couldn’t hold her ambrosia.
* * * *
I groaned as the throbbing in my head made me wonder if I was actually going to die. When I cracked my eyes open, I was sure of it. The light stabbed at me like needles, and I decided dying was preferable.
“Why do you have a pair of boxers?”
I flinched at Gran’s voice, twisting to see her standing above me.
